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A couple of weeks ago I found myself chatting with two highly educated adult men about pirates, as is the tendency of grown men when their partners aren’t watching. The conversation started when one of the men claimed to be confused as to why his two young children were so obsessed with pirates when the objects of their awe were little more than rapists and mass-murderers. The other agreed, referencing a celebrity chef’s programme on Cornwall as his source.
As the conversation went on it became obvious that the sticking point was a perceived disparity between the cultural archetype of the loveable rogues created and promoted in the modern media; that of the wooden legs, eyepatches, tricorn hats, gratuitous arrgh’ing, the exotic animals and birds as pets and the disdain for the authority of kings and countries, which apparently was all in direct contrast with the reality of the actual historical pirates that they were meant to represent.
The historic group upon which the modern archetype is modelled are now referred to as the golden age pirates, a group whose activities mainly took place in the twenty years between 1710 and 1730 across the Atlantic ocean and the Mozambique channel, focussing largely on the West Indies and the east coasts of the Americas.
Having read around this period for my own work on how the powerless have struggled with the powerful over the centuries and how that plays into modern struggles, the position taken by my friends really struck me as very surprising. And while I accept this is a good example of my own tendency to a false-consensus bias, there is a large body of respected work on the reality of this period. Not least of all the excellent “The Republic of Pirates” by Colin Woodard.
The reality is that the golden age pirates, and their personal histories that preceded that stage of their lives, in terms of their employment by the state and the subsequent revoking of their privateers licenses, the targets of their activities and the activities themselves is demonstrably different to the actions of Cornish smugglers and wreckers, the modern Somali pirates, or even the Hollywood characterisations of the golden age pirates themselves.
I suppose the reason that this conversation stayed with me was twofold. The first being how the cultural response of the British establishment at the beginning of the 18th Century to the golden age pirates was still being parroted on the streets of London over 300 years after it had first hit the newspapers, in direct contradiction to much of the respected work on this period. And further to which I suppose I shouldn’t really be surprised.
The second reason occurred later in the conversation as it moved on to the topic of the general election in the USA, and drew comparison to the first. There was a brief comment about the level of misinformation emanating from the Trump campaign and the extent to which it was being broadcast across the world by the traditional and online media. A statement that was quickly countered by the suggestion that the “left-wing” media were lying and spreading partisan propaganda as well.
These two comments stuck with me because they both highlight how misinformation and lies as a tool of the powerful to frame the politic experiences of the powerless is not just a modern internet based phenomenon but rather a process of persistent layering of misinformation which stretches back centuries. Specifically how much of what is not repeated in the cultural shorthand is fundamental to appointing the roles of hero and villain according to the requirements of the ruling elite. The golden age pirates are as good an example of this as is any.
Firstly, that before becoming pirates these people were largely demobbed seamen from the war of Spanish succession. And secondly that these “pirates” were actually attacking the merchant ships of the triangular trade and the colonial treasure ships returning to Europe. In short the pirates were cast aside public workers who were attacking the mass-murders, slavers, thieves and rapists of the European imperialist powers that had so unceremoniously cut them loose when they ceased to be useful.
There was an interesting irony to where the conversation I was having occurred for two reasons. The first because we were standing in the capital city of the country who’s throne had been so recently succeeded by King Charles III of the House of Windsor, which had previously been called the House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, which had succeeded to the throne of the House of Hanover through the marriage of Queen Victoria to Prince Albert, which had held the throne since George I ascended it in 1715. An event that directly influenced the behaviour of the demobbed mariners on the other side of the Atlantic. The second irony was that the part of London that we were standing in had in no small part been built on the profits that those same mariners were targeting, the profits of amongst other things the slave trade.
The political crisis in London represented more than simply which branch of a family sat on a largely ceremonial throne, as it fed into the imperial and religious tensions playing out across the European ruling elites and the empires that they had been fighting over for centuries.
When the childless Queen Anne died in 1714 it had caused a constitutional crisis as all her immediate relatives were Catholics, which disqualified them from wearing the British crown under the terms of the 1701 Act of Settlement. Hence the scramble to find a distant protestant relative to take over, which they eventually found in Germany in the second cousin George Ludwig who apparently didn’t need to speak English to rule over Britain. A crisis of succession in Britain not too dissimilar to that crisis of succession that preceded it in Spain.
As the royal families of the northern hemisphere waged war with one another to secure and hold dominion over the southern hemisphere, the rank and file of the militaries and the indigenous populations of the targeted countries where being horribly abused, exploited and murdered in their hundreds of thousands. The palaces, châteaus, government buildings, stately homes, sprawling avenues and grand boulevards that draw tourists today to London, Washington, Paris, Madrid and Berlin were paid for and built in celebration of the European genocide that was rolling across Africa, Asia and the Americas.
The golden age pirates were products of their time, and their time was one of the darkest in world history. And while some of them were demonstrably psychopaths, as cruel and inhuman as any imperialist of their time, others were politically motivated in the religious machinations of statehood on the other side of the Atlantic, and others still were simply trying to feed themselves and build homes the only way they knew how through the piracy that they had been trained in and licensed for by the same rulers that now wished them to quietly go away. Rather than draw attention to their rewriting of history and enforcement of the new imperial world order.